While a butterfly in Guatemala
stirs up the beginnings of El Niño,
a young man takes a comb from his wallet,
smoothes his black hair in a cockpit window,
and anticipates virgins in heaven.
Like Prometheus discovering fire
or Moses coming down from the mountain,
he radiates a prophetic desire
which inures him to fear of injury.
He could walk barefoot for days in the sand,
or survive weeks without ever eating,
or could simply resolve to understand
the controls in the flight simulator,
which stand between him and his creator.

I. Lesson

Berlin hums beneath my skin. The windows sweat.
A train moves east through frost and signal-light.
I write a line and lock it in a desk
where names are folded out of sight.
They tended me with razors and a bowl
then called me Joan and washed me clean of hair:
the blade cooled down; the water kept me whole.
I learned how names are borne, but not repaired.
I rode the war on borrowed light,
a Red ghost jumping boxcars with the news,
the folded paper in my coat at night,
a faded truth I carried—and abused.
Return to them. Return where orders start,
where mothers sing and break the soldiers’ hearts.

II. Proof

I watched their hunger gather like a choir,
the stairwells loud with breath and lifted hands.
They wanted truth the way a city wants a fire—
not light, but proof that order holds command.
They came in packs, their chanting loud as law,
the hallways ringing ribs and booted breath.
The room took heat; the men were made to draw
a line between obedience and death.
I went with them. I felt the iron sing.
My hands were clean. They did not shake.
The fire raged and cost us everything;
we fed it names until the night would break.
No mercy followed. Only this remained:
we burned the night, then asked it to be named.

The art of the second was born of need:
to sever the head—let it descend
to the retainer’s lap with proper speed
still hitched to the flesh it must transcend,
a newborn’s tether, pale and stubborn, caught
between what leaves and what refuses still.
Mercy and taste: the blade that answers thought,
the practiced hand that sanctifies the skill.
One final stroke to staunch a benediction
or to close the mouth before it speaks in vain—
and spare the watchers any fleck of sin;
the blood directed to a higher plane.
The breath revoked, the body’s work undone—
the tether breaks. There is no resurrection.

In the back room stood an altar in the dark
where good men weighed the cost of what they made;
they bartered one another part by part
and called the bargain work, the loss a trade.
It passed as work at first: a daily run,
a language shaped to hours, sums, and need.
Good men replaced good men, and one by one,
their names reduced to figures on a sheet.
One day they chose a righteous man instead
and named the choice expedient, not base.
In time, the work required a hand that bled;
the careful men learned execution’s face.
From then on, meetings logged the downward turn;
their words were sealed like prayers, then left to burn.

He kept a briefcase in his room,
a numbered lock, a loaded gun.
“What’s in it?” Nothing. Just a shrug
the way a monk seals up a tomb.
A year of nights, a silent proof;
a secret tucked behind the rug.
Too young for badges or the trade,
all bone and reach in undershirt,
just street enough to film a world
where men spoke easy into tape—
gang lore, a birthday stolen late.
I guessed at film, or cash, or dirt.
He drank. He warned me. Click by click,
the case gave up the girls they picked.

Or: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

I waded in the sea when the great fire raged
and gazed at the purple belt of Orion,
too far to hear the cries of the first brigade
and the deeds of Ofonius and his men.
My wife had whispered in my ear too late: flames
like wild horses circling the poet’s hill
scattered across the gardens of Mæcenas,
idling only when the winds grew still.
Yet I rode swiftly past the burning tower,
far above the embers on the Palatine—
I sang to my children in their woeful hour,
moved by Lucan’s tongue and Seneca’s mien
to comfort every orphan in the Field of Mars
and avenge their naked grief beneath the stars.

There is a window cut below the shin
where flesh and omen meet in calibrated light—
the measured grind of progress under skin,
a city yoked to burden, not to sight.
When one arm lifts, the trusses misalign,
their angles learning panic by degrees;
each span goes taut, a nerve along a spine,
each joint remembers weight as if it sees.
He coughs. The ovens answer with a roar.
Bellows collapse. The horizon flashes red.
The Captain mans the gait once more
and shifts the towers toward the city’s edge.
The legs descend. What held becomes a fall,
story by story, crumbling wall by wall.

I. The Map

Bunker-busters, daisy-cutters, kill-boxes, drones
slide into nerve, a gospel learned by rote:
desire refined to numbers, weight, and zones,
the body lifted cleanly into statute.
We sell it bright—the tagged, the priced, the blessed;
maps pulse, a breath held under screens.
A crater opens: children stand half-dressed,
all orphaned by the grammar of machines.
We know the land by how it takes the blow—
its passes flare, its lakes consumed by flame;
the caves inhale, trade routes go dark and slow
as patience tightens margins into gain.
We kill democratically—fire, food, and law—
and call the silence afterward withdrawal.

II. The Ground

The morning came incorrect. The light was thin.
Smoke stayed where rooms had been and would not lift.
We walked the street and found the street within
itself, collapsed by heat, reduced to drift.
A kettle split. The clock had lost its face.
Walls kept their angles. Doors would not align.
A book lay opened to a missing place,
its margin blistered past the final line.
We counted shoes, then stopped. The count was wrong.
A child’s name would not fit inside the mouth.
The well ran black. The radio stayed on,
repeating weather no one needed south.
Fire took the rest: the beds, the dates, the proof.
We stood. The day went on. The sky stayed blue.

apostrophe, I’m channeling Whitman—
he says that his atoms are rushing through
the veins of another revolution,
he’s quickly assimilating into
phosphor dots, trying to form a sincere
face—he is easing through our labyrinth
with a new heart, pulsing in the cursors
in a remote chat room at the first hint
of the apocalypse—now the future
is pixelating into his beard, his
singing hushed: A million Trojan horses
on the horizon are circling the skies—
beware the dark dreams spinning above you,
beware the dark dreams spinning above you.

To Whom it May Concern (I know not which,
since three of you presently rule Heaven):
It is I, your servant, whom you banished
from Paradise, your misbegotten son,
Asmodeus, Eblis, et cetera;
I will be brief, as you have not answered
even one of my many short dicta
(the last letter having been delivered
when Hannibal thundered across the Alps).
My icy quarters in the fourth ring
grow colder nightly, owing to your help,
which makes it more than difficult to bring
my varied concerns to your attention—
so for once, I implore you to listen.

Charon is derelict in his duties—
he sleeps on the banks of the Acheron
when he imagines no one is looking.
Cerberus is old and often prone
to taking long naps (and one of his heads
is not functioning, or so I’ve heard).
At Hell’s entrance, we’ve run out of hornets,
and the Titans flatly refuse to guard
the ninth circle until they are paid.
Also, the river of blood has congealed
and the great wall of Dis is in a state
of disrepair. I must also appeal
to your mercy, for I have bursitis
from standing so long in Lake Cocytus.

To wit, I am feeling a bit restless
and must remind you of my position.
I have been working this thankless business
forever: I deflowered the gardens
of Eden and Gethsemane, then paved
the Way of Sorrow; I drove Nero mad
until he joyfully set Rome ablaze;
I gifted the legions their zeal for blood,
then sealed the zealots’ fate at Masada;
with but a breath, I unleashed the Plague;
and I honed every skill of Torquemada,
the most inventive friar in Spain.
While my curriculum vitae is vast,
I’ve saved this point of contention for last:

It was I, not you, who caused the Great Flood.
My crowning achievement was cleverly
struck from those ledgers written in blood,
kept in your Celestial Registry.
I demand, forthwith, you address this error—
before the next millennium begins.
Otherwise, I may contrive some terror
hitherto spared from the annals of men.
Unfairly, the living in their naiveté
credit your hand for their misery
each time I mount a calamitous display—
yet I get saddled with Sloth, Wrath, Envy,
Pride, Avarice—and other trifles
your acolytes inscribed in the Bible.

But I digress. The soul that you sent down—
along with that surly shade, Virgil—
was civil enough, and so, I found
a serviceable courier for this epistle
and granted him safe passage to that end.
While we prefer to torture the guilty,
not those hell-bent on their own ruin,
we will receive him back accordingly,
for there’s always a home for the willing
in the hallowed, if not broken, circles
which you mysteriously built for me—
and since we’re shorthanded, his clerical skills
could save us from eons of paperwork.
Yours in all Perdition — Lucifer.